Rod Rosenstein’s Make-Up Call

Rod Rosenstein in Washington last week.CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

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The Trumpian chaos that’s enveloped the country should not be surprising. Our president is less qualified to hold the office than any of the previous occupants. “A man with a deformed personality and a defective intellect runs a dysfunctional administration,” as Bret Stephens writes.

But the last 10 days have included one very surprising episode: the apparent disappearance of Rod Rosenstein’s ethics.

To review: Rosenstein is a widely admired longtime Justice Department official. George W. Bush chose him as the top federal prosecutor in Maryland. Barack Obama decided to leave Rosenstein in the job, a reflection of bipartisan respect. Then Trump picked Rosenstein as his deputy attorney general.

Last week, though, Rosenstein disappointed — shocked isn’t too strong a word — his many admirers in the legal community by doing Trump’s bidding. With Trump wanting to fire James Comey as F.B.I. director in order to disrupt the Russia investigation, Rosenstein wrote a shoddy memo that gave Trump a rationale for doing so. Shortly thereafter, Trump admitted the truth, making Rosenstein look all the worse.

The events were deeply confusing. Rosenstein’s history made his actions almost impossible to believe. Yet the facts left no defensible explanation. It was a cautionary tale of the dangers that good people face when they go to work in the Trump administration.

Fortunately, the Rosenstein story took a new turn on Wednesday afternoon.

As the official overseeing the Russia investigation, he named a special counsel — Robert Mueller, a former F.B.I. director — to take over. That is precisely the move that many people (including The Times Editorial Board, in an open letter last week) have been urging. It doesn’t erase what Rosenstein did last week — and it doesn’t guarantee a real investigation — but it is a big deal. It’s the single best thing Rosenstein could have done to atone for his mistake.

In coming days, I expect that more members of the Trump administration will find themselves under pressure to violate their own principles. I hope they will remember both lessons of the Rosenstein saga. Helping Donald Trump isn’t worth your reputation. And you can often recover, at least partially, from your own mistakes.